Service organizations, such as consumer-service organizations, financial institutions, and product retailers, service customers using contact centers. Contact centers may handle a variety of tasks, such as new-business acquisition, customer service, technical support, or customer billing. Contact centers may include IVR services for customers to engage in self-help over the telephone (without or with limited live-agent interaction) or to help route a customer's telephone call to an appropriate agent. For example, an IVR service may route a customer calling with a billing inquiry to an agent in the billing department rather than another department by determining the reason for the customer's telephone call to the contact center.
Organizations running contact centers seek to maximize satisfaction of customers' goals while minimizing the involvement of live agents that require training, compensation, management, equipment, etc. To achieve this, the organizations collect and analyze data pertaining to customers' use of the contact center and how customers' interactions with the contact center are handled (e.g., call data). For example, an organization running a contact center may wish to monitor agent efficiency or track the number of callers to the contact center. This data may be difficult for an organization to monitor and analyze. For instance, some organizations may use an external Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider for their telephone network and IVR system. In such case, an organization may have limited access to the data it needs to monitor and analyze its contact center's operation. Further, because call data changes and may be spread out across multiple servers, the organization running the contact center may need to invest in a high-bandwidth network and large data-storage capabilities to receive, store, and process the call data. This may also require Information Technology (IT) resources and personnel to manage the network and data storage. Even if an organization received the call data directly from the VoIP provider, such as through an application, the organization may have no effective way to analyze the large amount of data it receives without investing time and resources into developing data-analytics systems and software, and without investing resources into an IT infrastructure. This, again, is due in part to the dynamic nature of the contact center's call data.
Accordingly, methods and systems are needed for generating application data from call data.